We conclude this paper with a few guidelines for encoding
document content in a display-independent manner. Electronic
encodings that adhere to these guidelines will enable multiple
uses of the same electronic source. Though the notion of
archiving information in its richest possible form is itself
not new, we note that such ideas have been exclusively
motivated in the past by the need to display information
visually. The richest representation for the specific problem
of being able to accurately reproduce the visual appearance of
information is not necessarily appropriate for
computing/ on the information. Visual presentations,
as pointed out earlier, are optimized for human consumption,
and therefore necessitate explicit human intervention in
performing intelligent/ manipulation of the
content.

Our work brings a fresh perspective to this issue by
addressing the problem of aurally rendering complex
information. It points out that the visual presentation that we
are all familiar with, e.g.,the printed version of
this paper, is just one possible view of the information
content, not the information itself. This insight leads
naturally to the approach used in AsTeR , namely the
development of high-level information representation and the
rendering of such representations in different modalities.

To ensure a multiplicity of uses, the digital library should
archive information in its richest form. Such encodings should
be capable of producing high-quality renderings in the various
output modalities, e.g.,a well-formatted PostScript or
PDF file containing high-resolution fonts, audio renderings
that exploit the various features of an auditory display, etc.
A digital library may choose to archive one or more of the
``display'' forms in addition to the high-level encodings as a
means of optimizing information delivery. However, archiving
information in any of these ``display'' forms is equivalent to
archiving information on printed paper. Hence, such ``display''
representations should not be viewed as a replacement for the
high-level encoding.

Retaining the high-level encoding that generates the various
renderings will facilitate:

Linking multiple views of the information.

Producing additional views of the information.

Searching the information.

Computing on the information in as yet unforeseen
ways.

The Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science is an
online journal to be published in LaTeX (Url: Hot
Link) and fulfills these ideals. The markup recommended to
authors has been carefully designed to abstract out all layout
details by the Managing Editor, Prof. Mike O'Donnell, and we
hope to aurally render articles from the journal using AsTeR .
See [O'D93][O'D92] for a description
of the work leading up to this project.